EMERSON AS A MAN.*

THESE three literary portraits of Emerson are all in different ways so admirable and interesting, that it would be difficult, and were it easy, it would be invidious, to place them in order of merit. We therefore assign precedence according to date of publication, and put at the head of our brief list the work of Mr. Cooke, which, though published before Emerson's death, and, therefore, necessarily incomplete, has more of the character of a formal biography than the volumes of Mr. Ireland and Mr. Conway. Of even Mr. Cooke's pages, nearly half are devoted, not to biography pure and simple, but—as was, perhaps, inevit- able—to exposition of, and comment upon, the philosophical, ethical, and literary opinions of the great writer of Concord. With these, we do not now propose to deal. In a previous article,f the strong and the weak points of Emerson's contribu- tion to the thought of his time were sufficiently indicated ; and we prefer now to dwell almost wholly upon the features of the singularly attractive and beautiful character depicted in these volumes.

The life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, like that of the majority of men of letters in our time, was not rich in events, or what are commonly known as such ; but we can well spare the superficial interest of incident, in a career so full of interest of a wealthier and more satisfying kind. If any figure be in itself impressive, it is more pleasant, and generally more instructive, to be allowed to observe it in repose, or in those attitudes of homely action which are instinctive and unconscious, than in the strain of struggle with external circumstances, where the gracious lines of individuality are lost, and we see simply an embodied type of the passion of conflict. Just as there are characters which recall one or other of the forms of nature— the flaming volcano with its far-reaching lava-streams of de- struction, or the solitary lake which is still enough to reflect every star—so there are others which make us think of the beautiful things of art,—of a tender strain of melody, a miracle of pictured colour, or a marble to which the sculptor has given an immortal life. Emerson reminds us of the marble, not carved into the agony of the Laocoon, but into the calm and satisfying beauty of the Apollo. The sur- roundings of his life were almost as ideally perfect as those with which the imagination of Wordsworth environed the maiden who grew three years in sun and shower. Born of a race of worthy ancestors, who combined the stern virtues of Puritanism with some of the gentler graces in which Puritanism was wont to be deficient, the very blood in his veins was in itself a great inheritance. His mother was a woman of whom one of her sons said "that in his boyhood, when she came from her room in the morning, it seemed to him that she always came from communion with God," and who has been described by one who knew her as possessed of great patience and fortitude, of a discerning spirit and a most courteous bearing ; "her sensible and kindly speech was always as good as the best instruction, her smile, though it was ever ready, was a reward." In addition to this inestimable possession, the little Ralph Waldo was surrounded by relatives and friends whose influence could not fail to be cultivating and morally useful to him in the highest degree ; while the home of his boyhood was one which, though it could not truly be called poor, seeing that all the real needs of its inmates were supplied, was still approached nearly enough by poverty to become acquainted with its bracing stimulus, but not so nearly as to have experience of its power to chill and harden.

Descending from a line of preachers who, generation after generation, had gradually passed from Calvinism to Arminian- ism, from Arminianism to Arianism, and from Arianism to the

• 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson : his Life, Writing; and Phliosoplin. By George Willis Cooke. Loudon Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson : his We. Genius, and Writings. By Alexander Ireland. Second Edition, largely augmented. London : Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.

3. Emerson at Home and Abroad. By Moneure David Conway. London: Tettbner and Co. t Spectator, May.6th, 1882.

now old-fashioned type of Unitarianism, it was natural that Emerson should find his way into a Unitarian pulpit; so in the beginning of 1829, when nearing the completion of his twenty-sixth year—having been born on the 25th of March, 1803—he received an invitation from the Second Church in Boston to become the colleague of the Rev. Henry Ware, jun. ; and as very shortly after this Mr. Ware was compelled by the failure of his health to resign his position, the sole charge of the Church was committed to the hands of Emer- son. His way in life now seemed to lie plain before him. In his retiring address, Mr. Ware, speaking of Emerson's acceptance of the Church's invitation, said, "Providence presented to you at once a man on whom your hearts could rest ;" and not only the hearts, but the minds of the congregation seem to have found full satisfaction in the character and addresses of their minister, who evidently had the support of his people, even in the act—at that time unprecedented—of opening his church to the unpopular anti-slavery agitation. Everything, in the best sense of the phrase, was going well, when, in the autumn of 1832, to the great grief of his congregation, he resigned his charge, the immediate reason for the step being

not, as might have been supposed, any change in his dogmatic position, but a growing feeling that certain religious forms—

notably the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper—were inconsistent with a true conception of the spirituality of Christianity. The ground he took Was very much the same as that which had been

long occupied by the Quakers, and his last discourse, which was at once a farewell and an apologia, is noteworthy, as showing his command of the logical method, which is conspicuously absent from the books by which his fame was won, and as giving us, there- fore, some reason to suppose that Mr. Conway is probably right

in attributing his general abstinence from logical forms to the fact that " he was more interested in points not to be so -carried." Never was a separation attended with less bitter- ness, or with more of a victorious affection which made all

differences seem trifling, than this of Emerson from the people -to whom he had ministered. Full of courage as he was him- self, and rich as were his sermons in the raw material for a

hundred fierce controversies, Emerson could neither be forced nor inveigled into the assumption of a polemical attitude. When lie delivered his celebrated address to the students of the Divinity College, Harvard University—an address which was, not unnaturally, received by the Christian world of America with a chorus of disapproval and alarm—he preserved an almost unbroken silence, perfectly sweet, with none of the sullenness which is wont to lurk in most silences of this kind. Only to his old friend and colleague Henry Ware; who sent him a letter of expostulation and a sermon of controversy, did he think it need- ful to say anything; and his words are instinct with a charac- teristic combination of firmness and gentleness. Emerson wrote :—

"I ought sooner to have replied to your kind letter of last week, and the sermon it accompanied. The letter was right manly and noble. The sermon, too, I have read with attention. If it assails any doctrine of mine—perhaps I am not so quick to see it as writers generally—certainly I did not see any reason to depart from my habitual contentment that you should say your thought, whilst I say mine I could not possibly give you one of the arguments you cruelly hint at, on which any doctrine of mine rests. For I do not know what arguments mean in reference to any expression of a thought. I delight in telling what I think ; bat if you ask me why I dare say so, or why it is so, I am the most helpless of mortal men. I do not even see that either of these questions admits of an answer, so that in the present posture of affairs, when I see myself suddenly raised to the position of a heretic, who is to make good his thesis against all comers, I certainly shall do no snob thing. I shall read what you and other good men write, as I have always done, glad when you speak my thoughts, and skipping the page that has nothing for me."

We do not quote this passage for its intellectual soundness, for the thought embodied in it seems to us merely a half-truth, but as an admirable illustration of Emerson's attitude in the presence of opposition. Another and a more humorous one is

given in an anecdote quoted by Mr. Ireland. Emerson had been delivering an address to a literary society, and a clergyman

being called upon to conclude the meeting with prayer, put up a petition in which occurred the remarkable sentence, "We beseech thee, 0 Lord, to deliver us from ever hearing any more such transcendental nonsense as we have just listened to from this sacred desk." The teller of the anecdote records that " after the benediction, Mr. Emerson asked his next neighbour the name of the officiating clergyman, and when falteringly an- swered, with gentle simplicity remarked, 'He seemed a very conscientious, plain-spoken man,' and went on his peaceful way." Emerson was certainly not a man with whom it was easy to pick a quarrel. His was the charity that is "not easily provoked."

After the severance of his connection with the Boston Church, Emerson, though he still occasionally preached, took no other pastoral charge,' but devoted himself to literature, or rather, to lecturing, for, with the exception of his poems, all, or nearly all, of his published works were originally prepared for use upon the platform. Henceforward his biography con- sists simply of an enumeration of the titles of his successive books, of the incidents of two voyages to Europe, and of a number of simple records which would be trivial, were they not so characteristic. It is mainly for their delightful collec- tions of this last kind of material that our thanks are due to Mr. Ireland and Mr. Conway. The former was Emerson's first English friend, the latter has for thirty years or more been one of his most faithful American disciples; and their long and—save by distance—uninterrupted communication with him has enabled them to give to their portraits not only verisimilitude, but vitality. Though of the three books before us, Mr. Cooke's is the most comprehensive, and will probably be found the most useful by the young reader to whom Emer- son is as yet a stranger, the two other works seem to us more attractive, because fuller of the intimate personal revelations, the homely, every-day manifestations of character, which enable us to know the man, not merely to know about him. Mr. Ire- land's account of Emerson's sayings. and doings during his three English visits fills so admirably a gap in all other biographies, and his narrative is throughout so simply and pleasantly written, that we are almost inclined to grumble at the modesty which has prompted him to confine his personal recollections within such comparatively narrow compass ; but volumes cannot be indefinitely enlarged, and we could hardly spare any of the inter- esting anecdotes which he has gathered together with such dis- crimination and industry. Mr. Conway has relied almost entirely upon his own resources, which, it is needless to say, are sufficiently ample, seeing that he was not only the intimate friend of Emerson himself, but of Hawthorne and other notabilities, who have made Concord one of the most interesting literary centres of our time. He has much to tell us about the Ernersonian circle, which included Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Alcott, Theodore Parker, and other persons, less known on this side of the Atlantic, but in many respects hardly less worth knowing, so the matter of the book is generally both new and valuable ; and though to some tastes its manner may seem too exuberantly rhetorical, it is so totally free from strain or affectation, that we find it pleasant rather than otherwise. If Sydney Smith were right in saying that every style is good that is not tiresome, then Mr. Conway's is a very good style indeed.

But our last words must be devoted to Emerson himself. If we are to judge of a man's moral and spiritual features by their reflection in the minds of those with whom he is brought into contact, it is hardly possible, after reading the unanimous testimonies scattered up and down these volumes, to doubt that his was one of the noblest, purest, simplest, and most harmonious natures of modern times. Even Carlyle's voice lost all its wonted austerity and gained an unfamiliar cordiality, in speaking of the day at Craigenpattock "when that supernal vision Waldo Emerson dawned upon us." Arthur Hugh Clough, not a person of ill-regulated mind, was possessed by the charm of Emerson, to whom he said it was good to go, and whom he declared to be the only profound man he had met in America. To Oliver Wendell Holmes he showed himself as "a soul glow- ing like the rose of morning with enthusiasm, a character white as the lilies in its purity," the end and aim of whose being was "to make truth lovely and manhood valonrons,"—which may all be true, but need hardly have been so affectedly expressed. A man of a very different type, Father Taylor, the well-known Methodist preacher and philanthropist, to whom Dickens has given an English fame; always spoke with intense emotion of the friend who had often helped him in his good works; and was proud of only one thing he had ever done, which was an answer given to some Methodists who objected to his friendship for Emerson. Being a Unitarian, they insisted that he must go to hell. "It does look so," said Father Taylor; "but I am sure of one thing, if Emerson goes to hell, he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way." To those who do not know the Emerson displayed to us in these volumes, a suspicion of exag- geration may hang about these panegyrics, but to those whose

belief in the possibilities of human nobleness is large, it will seem more likely that even such enlogiums should be just, than that eminent men, alike in hardly anything but honesty, should unite in a conspiracy of flattering falsehood.

Among those really qualified to judge, one person only would have been likely to indulge in a kindly challenge of their accu-

racy, and that person was Emerson himself. An unaffected and unobtrusive humility was one of his most noteworthy char- acteristics. When he recognised a difference between himself and others, it did not seem to occur to him to make his own nature the standard, and to regard other natures as deviations from it, though this is the attitude which most men instinc- tively assume. Instead of proudly dispensing tolerance, he gratefully accepted it; yet lost no real dignity, bat rather gained it by such acceptance. When he was asked by Theodore Parker's Society to deliver the chief address at Parker's funeral, Emerson wrote to express his sense of the loss which the country had sustained ; and then, after stating his reasons for thinking himself incompetent to perform the task assigned to him, said simply, "My relations to him are quite accidental, and our differences of method and working such as really re- quired and honoured all his catholicism and magnanimity to for- give in me." Emerson always seemed to himself the one needing to be forgiven.

Emerson was, nevertheless, a strong man. We have seen how he was the first to extend the hospitality of the Church to the early proclaimers of the gospel of emancipation ; and our last quotation shall be nstory told by Mr. Conway of how, in later years, he met the soldiers of slavery face to face :—

" When the Southern States began to secede, frightened compro- misers in the North hoped to soothe them by silencing the Abolition- ists: roughs were employed to fill the Anti-slavery halls, hurl missiles at the speakers, and drown every voice with their yells. When these scenes were occurring in Boston, Emerson repaired thither, and took his place upon the platform. The Music Hall, on one such occasion, was possessed by a vast throng of screaming roughs, whom the well- known Anti-slavery orators vainly tried to address. Even by those near the platform no word could be heard. Garrison was almost in despair, as was Wendell Phillips, who just then caught sight of Emerson, looking calmly on the wild scene. He went to him and whispered. Emerson advanced ; the roughs did not know this man, and there was a break in the roar, through which was now heard the voice of Emerson, beginning, Christopher North—you have all heard of Christopher North.' There was a perfect silence, as if the name had paralysed every man. Not one of them had ever heard of Christopher North, but this assumption of their intelligence by the intellectual stranger disarmed them. Emerson told the story of Christopher North, that he once defended his moderation in having only kicked some scoundrels out of the door, instead of pitching them out of the window,—and went on to show that under the circum- stances, the Abolitionists had exercised moderation. The power of mind over matter was happily displayed in the attention with which the crowd listened to Emerson, who spoke admirably, though with- out notes or preparation."

We have kept our resolution to speak of Emerson the man, rather than of Emerson the thinker. Of the legacy he has left to the world, the literary portion seems to us by far the most valuable; and it is pleasant to know that the teacher lived up to his teaching, and even embodied the declaration of a great Englishman, whom he loved to honour,—" that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem."